The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (review)

The Rediscovered Self follows on from Niezen's two most recent books, The Origins of Indigenism (2003) and A World beyond Difference (2004). The present book provides a junction where the previous two left off. That is, in both Origins and The Rediscovered Self, Niezen examines the concept of "indigenous peoples" as a legal rights neotransnational formation, while A World beyond Difference focused on the "cosmopolitan imaginings" of ethnic formalism. Likewise, in The Rediscovered Self Niezen circumscribes such imaginings onto the new ways that indigenous peoples are engaging politically, including recovering suppressed histories as foundations of belonging. In The Rediscovered Self, Niezen reengages these two key ideas by establishing the preeminent postcolonial studies dialectic in relation to identity, that is, essentialized notions of indigenous being and what he determines as "humanistic cosmopolitanism," or what Homi Bhabha might refer to as "third culture." Interestingly, while Niezen mentions Edward Said, the other two pillars of postcolonial studies, Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, do not appear in this new work.¹ This is surprising, given that what the author sets out to articulate through historical, legal, and ethnographic material pivots around the way indigenous people have profited through postcolonial essentialized notions of being, or what Niezen names the process of "ethnic formalization" and, specifically, the politicization of the term "indigenous peoples" as a legal concept and the development of what he distinguishes as "therapeutic history." Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism" and the way she theorizes subaltern plight and courses of resistance are particularly relevant here yet are left unmentioned.²

Niezen offers eight chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter is discrete from the rest in that all stem from distinct research projects. Nevertheless, the chapters are connected via key ideas or themes, including transnationalism, which Niezen defines in relation to the international indigenous peoples' movement as "a global network of those who share a consistent sense of self, a common sense of timelessness and fragility, and complimentary aspirations of self-determination" (9); ethnic formalism, where "culturally distinct subjects are formed by crises of justice" (10); and collaboration, which Niezen views as a new guard of indigenous leadership able to communicate within the halls of neocolonial power and, conversely, the production of a "lobbying-divide" that serves to exclude those indigenous leaders rendered institutionally ineffectual.

Chapter 2, "Transnational Indigenism," discusses how the politicization of indigeneity has occurred through collective discourses on human rights. In this chapter, Niezen looks at the key ideas that underpin an ambiguous indigenous recourse to rights, including the will to defend permanence, intergenerational continuity, and inviolable tradition. The chapter is crucial to the book because it brings to attention the oxymoronic condition of "indigenous rights," where the right to be different (i.e., the right to hold discrete collective, permanent, and traditional worldviews) is being processed through the Western Enlightenment formulation of equal, humanistic, and individual rights. The following chapter, "Digital Identity," relocates this discussion by looking at indigenous groups' growing dependence on the Internet to promote discourses of "indigenism," that is, the burgeoning reliance on the Internet for establishing and maintaining an ethereal collective that notionally empowers a discourse of generalizable indigenous rights. Moreover, Niezen alludes to the "new elite," whose lobbying via the Internet is conditional upon possessing legal-bureaucratic and linguistic-technological skills, suggesting, therefore, a digital divide and in turn the promotion of a certain kind of indigenous leadership. In chapter 4, "Culture and the Judiciary," Niezen points to the way the judiciary process in relation to indigenous self-determination enables a limited scope of indigenous definition. Specifically, definitions of aboriginal cultural rights via submissions through the Supreme Court of Canada are outlined. Importantly, the judicial neocolonial process has focused definition via the discrete precontact practices of various social formations. Such "juridification of knowledge" has served to narrowly define indigeneity as located in the past and, thus, has invalidated new forms of indigeneity that have sprung forth in the postcolonial...